


you're gonna carry that weight

by atiredonnie



Category: Octopath Traveler (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Character Study, Gen, Hallucinations, Haunting, Moral Ambiguity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:02:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29156277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atiredonnie/pseuds/atiredonnie
Summary: In Alfyn’s dreams nobody dies, least of all Vanessa Hysel, who is good and sweet and pulls her hair back with a white ribbon. She smells like bioluminescent moss and the sting of disinfectant and her nails are much too long and glow in the dark.Alfyn kills Vanessa. She lingers, seemingly out of spite.
Relationships: Alfyn Greengrass & Vanessa Hysel, Primrose Azelhart & Alfyn Greengrass
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	you're gonna carry that weight

**Author's Note:**

> octopath traveler is a good game. alfyn is a good boy. if he accidentally murdered vanessa during the chapter 2 fight with her would that be fucked up or what.

Alfyn really doesn’t intend to kill her, is the thing.

Maybe he wants to hurt her, at first, but the desire punches out of him like a desperate exhale as the axe swings down, a sharp slice through the bone, a little too late. Vanessa twists in premature agony. A living body very quickly becomes bloodied meat and soup. It’s so simple, the way she dies, life leaking out as glassy eyes focus on the sun, bitter to the fucking end. Her face is permanently warped by pain, but there’s still the slightest uptilt to the curve of her lips, a silent gloat. Look what you did, you sheep-fucking hick. Look at the mess you’ve made of me.

The moral victory, Alfyn thinks dazedly, goes to the cooling corpse that used to call itself Vanessa Hysel.

“Fuck,” he says, and then turns around and vomits into a bush. 

_In Alfyn’s dreams there is a girl that’s black and blue like a bruise and she tells him he’s okay now. She sets the bone properly and cleans up the carrion. Everything is going to be just fine._

_In Alfyn’s dreams there is a girl that smells like copper and sunshine and she’s nursing a wound like a child she doesn’t particularly care for and the blood spills out like a benediction and her hands are only shaking a little. This is not my first time being stabbed, she says, I can handle it, and then she laughs and her laugh is colder than her breath._

_In Alfyn’s dreams there’s a boy with sticky fingers and syrup palms and he’s nicking Alfyn’s coin purse and counting the dying flies. He scrunches up his nose like a kitten and shoves it away and he has more than enough but he only knows how to take. It fills up a hole somewhere that he’s too afraid to look at and he leaves the bar and if he looks back no one will know that, least of all Alfyn._

_In Alfyn’s dreams there’s a kid and there’s bits of seashell in her pockets and she leans forwards to tell Alfyn a secret and the secret is that she really wants to run away and not look back but this is her home and she can’t sleep alone, not without the smell of salt and a warm hand to clutch._

_In Alfyn’s dreams nobody dies, least of all Vanessa Hysel, who is good and sweet and pulls her hair back with a white ribbon. She smells like bioluminescent moss and the sting of disinfectant and her nails are much too long and glow in the dark. She beams with more teeth than there are stars like a nighttime-angler, and Alfyn thinks she is luring in something right over his shoulder and when he turns around she guts his fish stomach and gives a sick boy his liver._

_In Alfyn’s dreams Vanessa gets angry and poisons him but it tastes like the tonic he slips the dead and the dying to make them sleep easier to make their last moments something full of the dazed drunkenness of love, lips cotton-numb and swollen with tears. He doesn’t mind the rasp alongside the bottom of his jaw, he whispers, and Vanessa looks at him dispassionately like he’s nothing. He spits out blood alone and he prolly deserves it for the bodies he’s left in his wake._

_In Alfyn’s dreams he scrubs at his hands in the washbasin and he rubs and rubs and rubs until all his skin sloughs off and swirls down the drain, and he feels sick but he feels clean._

And Alfyn wakes. 

Someone carried him to bed - all six feet of him. Alfyn’s pretty sure it must have been Olberic, considering the size of everyone else, and he wants to laugh at the mental image before he remembers what just happened.

Correction. What Alfyn did. The mess he made with his own two hands, the hands he uses to spread aloe vera across itching skin, the hands he uses to push back strands of wayward hair and whisper kids to sleep. Fuck. _Fuck._

Alfyn wills himself to sit up in bed, murmuring individually to every nerve ending and wayward limb like a startled animal. He feels - numb, he supposes is the word, lethargic and empty, pain boiling beneath the pads of his fingers, ready to spill out. Every angel is terrifying. Alfyn wheezes, each breath taking more effort than even he understands, and lurches shakily, desperately, out of bed. His bones wheeze with the effort. 

There’s a woman standing in front of the window. A very, very dead woman.

Alfyn blinks. Shakes his head. Rubs the sleepiness out of his eyes, scrubbing painfully at his face. Vanessa just smiles, blood and tissue leaking from the left side of her face, a mangled fist of brain matter clinging to shattered bone. Her teeth and gums have nearly fused together. 

“What’s the matter? Aren’t I a sight for sore eyes?” 

Alfyn scrambles, suddenly alive again, ricocheting painfully out of bed and onto the floor. His knees bang against the uncarpeted wood. Vanessa grins gleefully, eyes - or, eye and mass of destroyed skin that used to be an eye - glimmering with untapped mirth. “You’re so easy, Greengrass! Easy to scare, easy to hate, easy to hit while you whimper like a child. Would probably be easy to bag, too, if I was interested in that, or really, anything other than leaving you beaten and alone,” She hisses out between hysterical giggles and staring flatly at the curve of her nails. Alfyn rises shakily to his feet. 

“You ain’t real. Not even a lick. Leave me alone.” He sputters. Vanessa pouts, in a way that would seem almost comical if Alfyn wasn’t two steps and a half away from a full blown panic attack, stomach swirling somewhere around his bowels, ice and heat meeting in equal measures. Vanessa slinks forwards, predatory. There’s noise from downstairs. Breakfast is downstairs, eggs and bread and thinly-sliced tomatoes. It feels so far away, heelturn from the bend in the road. Alfyn’s hands clutch at the wall behind him. 

“You’re going to hurt my feelings! Don’t you think you’ve done enough to me already? Take accountability, Alfyn. Isn’t that, like, clause the first on your bullshit moral code?” She wiggles her fingers mockingly as she speaks, a ghost parodying a ghost. Alfyn swallows, spit draining down. 

“This ain’t - accountability. I’m hallucinatin’, is all, they’ve got treatment for this. I can kill you again,” He bites, and then winces as the last line slips out like a slap. Vanessa simply howls joyfully, tickled pink by this turn of events. Fire ants squirm in her ruined eye socket. “Ouch! Ouch, ouch, ouch! Ten points to the hick from fuckoffland! You know what, I’ll even give you fifteen. I’m feeling generous.” He squeezes his eyes shut, but she’s still there, still a blatant black splotch marring the muted backdrop of his inn room, bone marrow puddling beneath her pale, bare feet. 

“You know,” she muses, almost playfully, fingers stroking the stubble on his chin, “It makes sense that you know just where to strike. Isn’t it part of being a quack? Is there a tangible difference, really, between knowing where to hit to hurt me and where to hit to heal me? Hurt is the absence of salvation, after all.” Vanessa smiles, and there’s the slightest hint of something gentle, or maybe Alfyn’s grasping at grain to make himself feel slightly less unhinged and unoiled. “Something smells good. Let’s eat, yeah?” 

She skips downstairs.

* * *

Vanessa ignores the tomatoes entirely. Alfyn supposes that he shouldn’t be surprised, that she’s the kind of woman who overlooks the healthier options, but he figured that if his mind had to conjure up a brain ghost of the woman he murdered, it might as well give her his eating habits. 

The woman he murdered. The words continue to ferment in the pit of his stomach, sour and vicious. Alfyn supposes he deserves it, the itching discomfort and wind-bitten heat. It’s the least of the penance he can offer up. 

Alfyn stares down at his mug of coffee, still steaming, beads of perspiration clinging to the rim. Penance. The word rolls across his tongue, heavy and uncomfortable. Is that what’s happening here? Vanessa, or the thing wearing her face, targeted his need to hold himself accountable for his mistakes. Can this buggered situation be considered penance? Is this what Alfyn’s doing? Decomposing himself, bit by bit, and attempting to wring meaning from the individual pieces? Is this how he recovers? Is this a normal, natural, human response to the scent of blood lingering on his clothes? 

Vanessa begins to talk between mouthfuls of peppered eggs, gesturing wildly with jeweled hands. Alfyn watches, gut churning as chewed-up food slides down the pathway of her bisected gullet, soft and supple and dead. “So I said to him, I can’t walk you home! We’re both dead!” She giggles at her own punchline, then shoots Alfyn a sharp glance when he decides, prolly wisely, not to respond. “What’s the matter? Not hungry? You haven’t eaten anything all morning. It’s practically noon! Your friends don’t exactly see you as a guy with an off switch.” Alfyn looks up, eyes dancing between his partners. They all seem… very normal. Tressa shoves a seemingly-endless supply of diced sausage down her maw, no doubt having calculated the exact amount of meat she can afford and still cling to the breadth of her riches. Beneath the table, Therion picks idly at his fingernails with a pocketknife. H’aanit slips scraps into her pocket, prolly to feed to Linde, who’s sleeping in the stables. Olberic looms over his plate, hands dwarfing the dinky silverware. Cyrus talks about something-or-other in Ophilia’s vague direction, as the cleric in question nods sleepily, head clearly buried in her bread. Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s content. 

Except. Primrose nurses a mug of warm milk to her chest, one eye on her plate, one eye aimed, with dizzyingly clarity, at Alfyn. Vanessa wolf-whistles, loud and obnoxious. Alfyn moves to shush her, and only realizes his mistake when Primrose blinks, taken aback. 

Shit. 

“‘Scuse me,” Alfyn mumbles, rising to his feet. Tressa waves a cheerful goodbye. Therion’s fingers pause on the hilt of his blade for a second, before continuing at his work. Olberic nods, just slightly. 

Primrose doesn’t move. 

Alfyn shoves his plate towards the barkeep, feeling vaguely nauseous at the sight of his untouched, quickly-cooling food. In a daze, he stumbles outside. Ocean air stirs up the hairs lining his arms as Alfyn leans back against the back wall of the inn, eyes squeezed shut, heart beating painfully in his mouth, apple of his eye, on his tongue. Vanessa strolls out with him, arms swinging jauntily by her sides. In the distance, two seagulls fight over a bisected salmon. He breathes in. Out. In. 

Out. 

In. 

Tries to remember - the sun on his back. The clumsiness of dry-cloth bandages, soaking up the dirt and the dark and the blood out of each and every wound. The phantom bruise and fragility of the kids who won’t die, who cling to life even as their vessels burst beneath their eyelids. Tries to remember the feeling of hitting the ground head-on. The pain the rings out like a gong. The pain of the very, very real.

“What is your problem, cotton-brain,” Vanessa spits out, and _oh,_ Alfyn thinks dumbly. _Oh, I made her mad._

Vanessa crosses her arms, jutting out a singular self-righteous finger to wag in his general direction. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this is hardly making anything better! I’m still dead! I’m still - this summation of crumpled flesh and bone and you’re supposed to heal me. You’re supposed to make me better.” Alfyn stares at his feet. “You’re an apothecary, aint’cha? Do it yourself,” he mutters, not quite quietly enough to not be heard. He’s not used to speaking quietly. To reining in the flights of the tongue. 

Vanessa snarls, wild and rabid at the mouth. Foam bleeds through the hole of her eye, a white-hot memory of a girl spitting up her own organs, whispering get up, get up, get up. Alfyn stares pettily into her eyes and feels like a child holding something bigger than him in his hands. And it’s slipping through his fingers, draining onto cobblestone, gutter slick with mud and gold-dust grit. “Oh, so that’s what this is.” Vanessa says, and there’s almost an element of defeat to it, as if the words are being ripped individually from her body, until all she is is the hole where they used to be. “You’re mad because I’m not you, is that it? I’m dead and I’m rotting in a cave somewhere and you never got to fix me up with your pretty healer-boy hands. I was never the apothecary you wanted me to be and oh, does that mean you’ll be like me someday, a raving quack feeding children molten garbage and charging them liquid gold? That’s not on me, buddy. That’s on you.” 

She leans forwards, probably to yell more, and then pauses, eyes flicking back and forth distrustfully. 

Footsteps. 

Alfyn spins around, and wishes halfway through that he had let his hand flicker to the hilt of his axe, and then wonders if there’s truly something fuckin’ wrong with him, that he wants to be a whipcord-snarl person, a tangled up knot of regret and the need to smell like burning metal. 

And then he fully registers the red and gold and sand-brown in front of him and relaxes. Primrose. 

Her lips part, about to speak, before she stops, frustrated. Her fists clench hard. Eyes stormy. The curve of her body encumbered with stress, like a rope fraying at the edge. Alfyn blinks. “Primrose?” She sighs, and, almost imperceptibly, pushes back a singular strand of hair. Looks him directly in the eye. 

It’s… distracting, to say the least. Alfyn prides himself on being’ a gentleman, but he’s still a man, and Primrose is very much a woman, coal-dark gaze and hawklike nails notwithstanding. She’s the kind of girl who’s hyper perceptive of wandering looks, though, and it’d be pretty damn disrespectful, so he matches the slope of her eyelids, the copper-colored lamplight in her hair, every step, a bending mirror. She looks just like the sun. She feels just like a murder waiting to happen. 

“Back there,” she says smoothly, rouge-red and, to Alfyn’s slightly-addled mind, the striking image of Sealticge herself, “What were you seeing?”

Alfyn freezes. 

What? 

“Seein’ - somethin?” He laughs, the sound stilted and pathetic even to him. “Like… a person?” 

Primrose frowns, her mouth a pliable exit wound, leaking the gritty pigment she smears her face in during the bare-bones hours of the morning, when the sky is still watery and new. “Contrary to popular opinion, you are not a stupid man. Yes, people.” Alfyn winces, an exaggerated palate of hurt. “You wound me, Prim, really. And as for people, I’m… not. Seein’ anyone, that is. Not hallucinations, ‘n not a partner, neither.” Primrose stares at him for a moment longer. Butterfly eyelashes. Burnished waist. A smeared, warm-color sky. 

“It’s not… a judgement thing. Really.” She says, almost awkwardly, and for a second this is what Primrose is: 

A girl. 

Standing soft and thick-haired and quiet at the head of the house. 

Waiting for the fireplace to flicker out so she can crawl home, dirty with mud and the stench of death. 

Alfyn reels backwards from it, blue and black and marrow-cold. He remembers the sound of something breathing through destroyed lungs, that gentle cave of falling-asleep-forever, and everything that goes with it. That’s what Primrose is - painted in shades of falling-asleep-forever, of waiting for the moment where she can finally fall over and die alone. 

Alfyn remembers what Vanessa said. That to be what he is you need to know that hurt is the absence of help and someone has crafted Primrose in the image of a punched-out hole, the echo a man left behind him. The distinct lack of salvation. 

“It’s not a judgement thing,” She continues, brow set and lips frowning distinctly, “because I’ve lived it. Do you remember Yusufa?” 

And how could Alfyn forget Yusufa. 

At the beginning, it was just the two of them, after all. Alfyn in the desert, mopping his brow and sipping gingerly at his canteen of water like it was going to bite him. Primrose beneath that cliff, desperate and alone, snapping like a caged animal, blade slick with poison and hard-earned pain. And Yusufa. The body cooling beside her. 

Primrose held her hand when she died. Alfyn stumbled upon them half-delirious not even five minutes later. 

Funny, the way the world works. 

Primrose’s back is ramrod-straight with faint tragedy. “She wouldn’t leave me. The first few weeks, she stayed. But it wasn’t… her, you know? It was something with her mouth and eyes and laugh but it wasn’t her. It was me. What I thought she was. What I thought she’d say. Like, she was gone, and here was this future she never got to live, and there I was writing it out for her. But that didn’t make it her. Just another thought I had to come to terms with. Do you understand what I’m saying?” 

“Yeah.” Alfyn says, taken aback by the calmness of his own voice. 

“Good,” Primrose says, and turns back. 

Five steps away from the door, she pauses. Looks at him. Shakes her head, one, twice. 

And then she leaves. 

“Let’s go to the beach,” Alfyn says, and for once Vanessa doesn’t have any complaints. He’s stolen them all out of her mouth, after all. Out of his.

* * *

Vanessa pokes at the ground with a piece of driftwood. “You’re a liar,” she says petulantly, and Alfyn agrees. Aelfric, does he agree. “You’re a liar, and you’re pathetic, and you smell like a swamp crawled up your ass and died.” Alfyn closes his eyes. Leans back into the sand. “Don’t think swamps can crawl much. They ain’t sentient things.” Vanessa rolls her eyes, and halfway through decides to make it a whole production, wiping dust off of her thighs and doing a stupid-looking half-spin in the air. “Okay, sorry. What I mean to say is that I hate you and you smell like trash. Psychoanalyze that, genius.” 

Alfyn yawns. “You know, you’re not that scary.” 

“Bullshit. I’m horrifying. Look at me. I leak.” 

Alfyn cracks an eye open. “That’s true.” 

“You did this.” 

“Shucks, I sure did.” 

“Aren’t you guilty?” She says, finally, a note of gentle melancholy permeating the question. Alfyn turns around. She blurs just once, the edges of her body softening with smoke. “Yes. Truly fuckin’ guilty. You were a shit person, Vanessa. But it’s not my job to decide the threshold for life. My hands aren’t made for that kinda work.” 

Vanessa bends down, down, down, less of a motion and more of an undulation. She takes his palms in her hands and turns them over, examining the lines. “I called your hands pretty, before. That was a lie. They look like… Well. They look like hands after a lifetime of crafting splints and cutting wood, I guess.” Alfyn chuckles, and it sounds like a noise he’d actually make, which is an accomplishment given the state he’s in. “You’re wrong, though. Sometimes it’ll be you, you know that? Nobody wants to make those life-and-death choices. Sometimes it’ll be you.”

“Can’t I wait some? Just a little longer.” 

Vanessa smiles. “You’ve breached that threshold, sunshine-boy. Let me tell you something - here’s what you think you are, okay? You think you’re the people who didn’t make it. Is that true? Is that right? Are you your biggest failure? The proof of the monster is the bodies. It is not direct proof. But it will do.” 

Alfyn swallows. “I dunno. The blame’s gotta go somewhere.” 

Vanessa hums, cupping his face. The real Vanessa Hysel is dead. This one smells like strawberries. “I am not a good person. I can put it in many other places where it doesn’t belong. Like shoving a square peg into a round hole.” 

“That’s hardly taking responsibility.” 

“You are not,” Vanessa says, hands on his shoulders, “Responsible for my actions. You are responsible for cleaning up your messes, but not for me. Never for me. You buried me, right?” 

“Yeah,” Alfyn says, helplessly. It’s morning. The sun is going down anyways. 

“I always wanted to be cremated. But when you think about it, this is just a slower version of cremation, right? It all returns to the earth. Dust and bones wither away. What matters is the distinction of time.” 

“Vanessa Hysel,” He states, “Prolly didn’t wanna be cremated. Had no opinions on tha whole matter either way, most likely. Prolly figured she'd die alone and it wouldn’t matter.” 

She tilts her head, strands of faded-out hair spilling over the incline of her shoulder. “I’m not Vanessa Hysel, so that doesn’t matter, does it?” 

“No,” Alfyn says. “You’re not. And it don’t.” 

She ends as quietly as she began.

Alfyn meets his friends on the bridge, in the rain, later that afternoon. Tressa’s stockings are soaked and tangled with seaweed. Therion is using one of Cyrus’s textbooks as an umbrella. Alfyn steps in his own reflection, and his boots fill up with water, a whisper. This is what you are. This is how you’ll die. 

He supposes there are worse things to inherit, than the dirt beneath the soles of his shoes and the part of him that tells him to get Tressa a cup of hot milk and a blanket immediately. He supposes there are worse hills to die on. 

Alfyn rolls up his sleeves. 

A man is not a tourniquet. The blood will go where it wants.


End file.
